Sunday, August 24, 2025

9:00 AM | A Small Garden Party

There are days that unfurl so perfectly that you can only count them among the blessings that make life bearable, even luminous. They arrive like small benedictions, reminding you that there is still some sweetness in being alive, that there is still a feast to be had even in the shadows.

For me, that day arrived on the 17th of August this year, a surprisingly bright Sunday in the middle of a month known for its turbulent weather. But thank God for that sunny, breezy day, because I finally fulfilled a wish I had carried since I was a high schooler watching too many European films. Those films—you know the ones, where the camera lingers on a long table laden with fantastic dishes, under a tree, filled with people laughing or breaking bread, as if an eternity is contained in an afternoon—imprinted on me a vision of how a meal among friends can be a communion, a reminder that the good life is not about grand gestures, but about company, food, and the presence of trees. For decades, it was only that, a cinematic fantasy. At my age, alas I still do not have the sprawling villa, nor the terraced gardens with ancient stone, nor the long rustic table that had seen the weight of generations. I only had the wish and the fantasy.

But turning fifty has a way of rearranging your sense of what is possible. There is no more time for the “someday.” If not now, then when? If not in this life, then never. And so, with my significant other, Renz, I said: Why not now? And why not here, in the Maghanoy compound in Taclobo, that patch of memory and inheritance first secured by Renz’s grandfather in 1989?

A garden is still a garden, and a long table for a meal is only a matter of assembling chairs and flat surfaces and linen. And besides, isn’t that the point of dreams—that they don’t require perfection, only the courage to enact them in the form that life allows?

And so, we did it.

We borrowed the tables and the chairs and the linen from a good friend, Marikit Armogenia, who gave us not just furniture but a sense of welcome, a gesture of generosity that made the whole endeavor feel more grounded in community. We adorned them with the blossoms that have always meant happiness to me—the radiant yellow of the chrysanthemum. The bundles of flowers—a gift of my Manila-based friend Ted Regencia—sat in vases like bursts of small suns, uncomplicated but enough to light the air with cheer.



We laid out food that felt like home: escabeche from Lab-as, with its balance of tang and sweetness—facilitated by Tita Macrina Fuentes and my high school classmate Sande; smoky and tender lechon manok and liempo from Golden Roy’s—facilitated by my old high school teacher, Ma’am Cassion; and from Renz’s magic hands, chicken curry fragrant with spices, the [slightly] bitter honesty of ampalaya salad, and the earthy freshness of pako salad, a taste that spoke of mountains and streams—and the way my mother exactly prepared them for me when I was growing.

This spread of my favorite food [and flowers] made less for spectacle and more for satisfaction, the kind of presentation that doesn’t need to be fussed over because it already lives in the bloodstream of our memories. And then my people arrived—a carefully selected list of 15, agonizingly pared down from higher numbers I could not accommodate for logistics reasons. Ernest and Gayle Acar. Karl and Gail Villarmea. Hersley and Toulla Casero. Mohammed Malik and Finola Uy. Lyde Gerard Villanueva. Justine Megan Yu. Tara De Leon. Kaycee Melon. Warlito Caturay Jr. Alana Narciso. Khail Campos Santia. And Tita Melisa Maghanoy, Renz’s mom. People who represented aspects of me, barring those who could not come for some reason or other. Each one was a reminder that a life is not measured in what you’ve hoarded but in who has chosen to sit at your table. These fifteen guests filled the garden with laughter, with stories, with the heat of shared presence. A beautiful crowd for a beautiful day.





















I called it a “literary lunch.” Because books and words have always been the meat of my life, and because it felt right to give the occasion a shape beyond food and fellowship. So I asked everyone to speak of gratitude—but with a rule: no mentioning of husbands or children, since they were already a given. Gratitude must be about the self, the singular joys, the quiet triumphs, the overlooked grace notes that make up one’s song. It was astonishing to hear the answers, little confessions of bliss that reminded me how textured life can be, how rich we all are if only we bothered to take inventory of our small joys.

Then I read to them “The 50 Gratitudes,” the essay I had written for and of myself for this occasion, a litany of thanks for the years and the loves and the accidents that have brought me here. I bundled it with two other pieces I had written for my birthday month [“The Confessions of Secondhand Rose” and “My Mother, The Muse”] and made a zine, my little giveaway for the day, because what is a birthday if not also a chance to give back the words that have sustained me? To see my friends leaf through those stapled pages, to hold in their hands my attempt at summing up half a century—it was my way of saying, “Here, take a piece of me with you, because you are already part of my story.”

















Fifty as an age can a frightening number. You wake up to it and realize you have been on earth for half a century, that you are no longer the “young one” in the room, that your body creaks with the accumulation of time.

But I think fifty is also a tender number. It carries not just the weight of age, but the buoyancy of having survived, of having made it this far despite everything. It whispers: look around, you are still here. And what better way to mark it than to sit under the trees, at a long table, in the company of those who matter, and to say: thank you, thank you, thank you.

Because a good day is never just a day. It is a culmination of every choice, every act of courage, every hand extended to you in love. A good day is the flowering of roots you sometimes forget you planted. And a good life, if we are lucky, is only a constellation of such days, strung together until they shine enough to light the rest of the journey.

That August 17 Sunday was one such day. I think of it now with the certainty that whatever lies ahead, I have already known joy.

Labels: birthday, friends, life

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Sunday, August 17, 2025

9:00 AM | The 50 Gratitudes*

* Which feels like a portmanteau of “gratitude” and “beatitudes”—i.e., thankfulness for supreme blessedness. Today, I turn 50. I think it’s important to celebrate it with fifty things I am grateful for:

1. That I’m alive at 50. Everybody wise tells you it’s a privilege to get older. Not many people are given this gift. This is especially true for me because I never thought I’d reach this age, to be frank about it. The thought of dying has been a constant shadow entire life. When I turned 33, the so-called “Christ Year,” I remember crying almost every day—even when I was riding a pedicab—because I really felt deep in my bones that death was knocking on my door from all manners of demise, either by affliction or accident. It was a difficult mindset to shake off. But I think what I was scared about was the idea that I had not reached my full potential yet, and had not made my mark on the world, no matter how small. This scared me and not “death” itself. That dance with mortality somehow ultimately faded when I entered my 40s, but what a grim dance that had been—a tango of cartwheeling emotions all wrapped in the name of personal legacy.

2. My resolute stubbornness to do my own thing—sometimes to my own “detriment” [but not really]—is something I am actually grateful about. [Sometimes I call this “instinct.”] For example, I was enrolled in first grade at North City Elementary School in Piapi, and my homeroom teacher was a wonderful woman named Mrs. Limpiado. Within weeks of the schoolyear just beginning, she had to leave for somewhere [I think the U.S. for a much-needed reunion with family], and she was soon replaced by another teacher, who was probably not bad—but I did not stand for that replacement. At seven years old, I absolutely refused to continue going to school, unless Mrs. Limpiado came back. One time, I even peed on the classroom floor just because. My mother was flustered at my uncanny stubbornness. “You will have to repeat Grade 1 next year if you don’t go back to school!” she implored. But … I … did … not … care. So I stopped school that year—and by the next year, we had moved to another house in another barangay, and my mother enrolled me at nearby West City Elementary School. Guess who was the new principal at my new school: Mrs. Limpiado.

Note 1: This stubbornness would have other versions in the coming years. I can endure whatever hell that comes my way when my mind is made up about something.

Note 2: This is why I am older than my classmates in grade school and high school. I never minded the teasing I got for it. In my mind, being adamant with my refusal at 7 was correct.

3. My adult ADHD diagnosis in 2022—which made me learn to forgive myself, and made me make sense of things in my life I never understood before.

4. Friends who understand why I am what I am. [See #2.]

5. Also former friends who don’t. It’s … fine. I’ve long ago accepted that I can’t expect everyone to like me. I don’t like everyone either.

6. Second chances. And third chances. Even fourth.

7. To live in Dumaguete. To be here, and to call it home, is such a blessing. The fact that this city thrives on culture and the arts, and is so near both sea and mountains, is something most of us living here take for granted. Not me. I love that I can be at the foothills of Valencia town in the morning [perhaps also at the Sunday tabo at the población, when I can wake up for it], then proceed to Dauin for some beach fun in the afternoon, and then attend a piano concert at the Luce in the evening. This is the magic of being in Dumaguete.

8. Henny Penny, that mighty red chicken in our grade school textbooks, who taught me to read.

9. My grade school teacher Ma’am Bennie Vic V. Concepcion, who first recognized that I could write—even though I had no idea.

10. High school classmates, who become forever friends.

11. Kokak and Tedo from college days.

12. Friends—Krevo, Hendri, Razcel, Willy, etc.—who take me to strange and beautiful places that I would never venture into on my own. White rabbits all of them, and I am their Alice.

13. My writing mentor, Timothy Montes, who made me join the Silliman National Writers Workshop in 2000—although I didn’t know anything about it. [He also made me join The Weekly Sillimanian.] Teachers who push you should always be celebrated.

14. The fact that I’ve traveled the world extensively, for free. And usually because of my writing.

15. Japan, which bled me of my homesickness.

16. New York in the autumn.

17. Sagada in 2008.

18. Meals that make you adequately full and happy. And chicken curry, fern salad, fried bangus, and escabeche—the food my mother used to cook to make me happy.

19. That rare really good cup of coffee that lifts you from the doldrums.

20. “Film school” courtesy of Goodluck Store near the tianggue.

21. Reading really good books, and being in a daze after finishing them, and being so envious of the writing. Call Me By Your Name, Giovanni’s Room, The Pillars of the Earth, Interpreter of Maladies…

22. Dean Francis Alfar telling me I could do speculative fiction.

23. The films and books of Nora Ephron. When she died in 2012, I had no idea I would be so heartbroken. Her life is the one I want to emulate the most, to be honest, including her writing mantra: “Everything is copy.” [Two essays that she wrote—”What I Won’t Miss” and “What I Will Miss”—are the inspiration for this very essay you are now reading.]

24. The Hive who made me feel welcome when I badly needed friends after a breakup.

25. The sight of Renz coming towards me.

26. The sound of Renz laughing over some movie or television show. Usually RuPaul’s Drag Race.

27. Under the Tuscan Sun, especially the movie.

28. Avatar: The Last Airbender, the original animated series, which Renz made me watch, and which honestly is one of the best written television shows in history.

29. Clair de Lune by Debussy. Especially when I hear it out of the blue in the early morning.

30. Being able to watch Lady Gaga live in concert. [Because I was not able to catch Madonna when she toured Asia.]

31. All the boys that broke my heart. [Read my collection, Don’t Tell Anyone.]

32. People who don’t mind that I can’t remember names, even though I do remember my experiences with them.

33. The days when you can roll in bed all morning, with no meetings to anticipate, and with absolutely nothing to do. [It’s also nicer when there’s soft rain outside.]

34. My collaborations with Hersley-Ven Casero, which have been very productive.

35. Newly-dagit friends in Dumaguete who inspire me, and make me experience my city in a new way again. Like having literary lunches!

36. Dear friends who once told me, “Let’s help you make your dream come true,” and then they did Dumaguete LitFest with me! You should always cherish friends who tell you they want to help you make your dreams come true. That’s very rare.

37. Dessa, Lana, and Karl, who asked me to come back to teaching—even though I didn’t want to.

38. Tita Melisa who gave me a home and a bubble, especially during the pandemic.

39. The pandemic, which—although horrific in places—also taught me I could live very simply, and still be satisfied. It taught me not to strive for positions, or for property. All these things don’t really matter.

40. Dad jokes, and laughter that splits your sides.

41. The fact that I still believe in God, despite Christians.

42. My father.

43. My sisters-in-law and my nieces and nephews.

44. My brother Rocky.

45. My brother Alvin.

46. My brother Edwin.

47. My brother Dennis.

48. My brother Rey.

49. My mother.

50. The fact that—see #1—I have finally absolved myself with all needs of “legacy.” It’s an impossible ask, and one that is totally beyond my control. But I love that I have done my best to pursue the very specific things I love, and I am grateful that some of these have touched the lives of people.

* * *

But legacy is something I cannot help but grapple with, especially now. Truth to tell, I have been the recipient of three recognitions that promise me there is some personal legacy at play. Years ago, I was Hamiling Bayawanon. In 2021, I was given the KSSLAP Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in recognition of my writing life and my cultural work, and I’m included in the literature volume of the newest edition of the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. This year, I am recipient of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards, also for the same recognition. When I received the notice regarding that last one, I remember posting on Facebook: “I think I’m still too young for this.” But a friend later told me that age has no bearing on these things, that they are recognitions for our contributions to the community—and that they should be received with gratefulness and humility. And I finally agreed.

I’m glad that I’m still relatively young and able bodied while I’m getting these awards and opportunities. I do not want to be too old and too physically infirm when accepting these accolades, as I see it sometimes happen. And also because—and this is my bombshell if you’ve read this far—I really have no idea how much time I have left.

Call this as shades of #1, but truth to tell, I am aware that my body might soon betray me.

I mentioned my brothers and my mother last in this litany of gratitude, not just because they’re family, but also because there is a physical ailment that we share that we have only discovered in the past decade. My mother hails from Bayawan, but her ancestors—like many in that southern Negrense city—are from Panay. There is a rare type of genetic movement disorder that comes from Panay called Lubag Syndrome, an X-linked dystonia-parkinsonism that primarily affects men, particularly those from this island, which they inherit from their mother. The condition is characterized by a combination of dystonia—which is involuntary muscle contractions causing twisting and repetitive movements—and parkinsonism, which can induce tremors, rigidity, and slow movements.

Four of my brothers have it now in varying degrees, and I have a fifty percent chance of also getting it. I will not deny I am a bit afraid of this possibility—but at the same time, I do not want to worry about things that may be beyond my control.

What I have now is just my present, and how I will live it. I want to travel. I want to finish my books. I want to use what time might remain of my able body to finish the work I have set out to do. Part of this project is also letting go of things that does not matter at all in my life, like toxic people, and surround myself with people I love and respect. Another part of this project is expressing my gratitude, hence this birthday list. How many years do I have left? Five? Ten? I have no idea. But I am grateful that I have so far lived a relatively good and simple life, filled with many goodhearted people—and at 50, I feel a fierce urge to really live.

Labels: birthday, family, life, love

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Wednesday, August 13, 2025

7:00 AM | Poetry Wednesday, No. 252.

Labels: birthday, poetry

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Sunday, August 10, 2025

9:00 AM | My Mother, The Muse

My mother Fennie—Ceferina in her old birth certificate—has been a lot of things in the nonagenarian counting of the years she has lived her life: an orphaned girl raised by grandparents, a dreamer who wanted to be a nurse, a very accomplished hairdresser, an unlucky sugar planter, a party-loving socialite in a small town, an impoverished peanut butter maker and vendor, a fervent born again Christian, and an inspiration.

She will turn 94 on August 17, which is also my birthday, and here I am writing about her as my muse. All artists invariably have muses. Sometimes they are friends or family, often they are lovers, occasionally they are strangers glimpsed just once on the street or in a café but makes such indelible impression on the art maker that they soon possess the imagination, enough to engender creation.

Sometimes they can even just be the mere idea of someone, or an ache in the shape of a person long gone. But a muse, if one thinks deeply about it, is not merely a subject. They are a mirror that shows the artist a self they cannot see alone, a catalyst that makes their work urgent. Art-making is, at its heart, a conversation between the maker and the made-for, which is sometimes tender and sometimes savage. A muse sharpens the stakes for the artist: the painting must be worthy, the novel must reach the fever pitch of confession, the dance must breathe like a lover’s sigh. The art they cause to being are really love letters to these people, to moments with them, to lives perhaps already slipping beyond the reach of the artist. Inspiration, one can say, is always a kind of pursuit of these fleeting things.

For the painter Frida Kahlo, the muse was her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, equal parts tempest and harbor, the storm that broke her and the light that also made her paint again. For the musician Leonard Cohen, it was Marianne Ihlen, the woman in the Grecian dress who became “So Long, Marianne” and all the other songs he wrote to chase her ghost. For the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was his wife Zelda, who was a dazzling and self-destructive Southern belle whose brilliance and fragility flickered in every line of The Great Gatsby. Theatre director Peter Brook found his muse in Natasha Parry, his actress-wife, who for decades animated his vision of theater as a sacred and living exchange. The choreographer George Balanchine had a litany of muses such as Maria Tallchief and Suzanne Farrell, who were not just ballerinas but virtual architects of the very movements he conjured, their bodies the ink in which his choreography was written.

For me, my heartbreak stories have been occasioned by the results of erstwhile lovers, but my true muse—the person who inspired me to write the steadiest of my fiction—will always be my mother.

One of my earliest stories, “Old Movies,” which won me my first-ever Palanca in 2002, is my wildest incarnation of her: the character of Charo is my imagination of my mother as a fragile Tennessee Williams character, given to drama and Scotch. I wrote of her this way in that short story: “On bad days when she is not Ava Gardner, or Kim Novak, or Lolita Rodriguez, Mother is a weeping shadow, her room locked and curtained off—her darkness as dramatic as the lull before an evening’s last full show.” Totally the opposite that my mother has been in my life—and yet I am perfectly aware that when I was writing this character all those years ago, the face she bodied was my mother’s face.

In “The Hero of the Snore Tango,” the story that won me my second Palanca in 2003, I made an attempt to write a story about my father. Invariably, that character has a wife, and she is my mother as I knew her in the early 1980s—an embattled woman who used to have big dreams, but was now reduced [not a good word] to peddling homemade peanut butter, which she would deliver house to house to rich people who used to be her close friends.

In “Things You Don’t Know,” which in 2007 won me the very first of my first prizes for the short story in the Palanca, there is the character of the grandmother who willfully ignores the secret travails of her daughter and her jobless son-in-law, and who spends her days in her bedroom watching The 700 Club on television. That detail is taken after how my brothers and I convinced my mother to consent to us finally getting a television set in the late 1990s. “If we have TV, you could watch The 700 Club all you want!” we told her, targeting her religious streak. In real life, she did say yes—but she never really got to watch the shows she wanted: we, her boys, were all over controlling the watching of shows in the days when cable TV was quite new to Dumaguete.

These three stories are collected in my first collection, Beautiful Accidents, published by the University of the Philippines in 2012. I brought out another book that year, this time a collection of my speculative fiction, Heartbreak and Magic, published by Anvil Publishing. Not a lot about my mother in that collection of my fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories—but “The Sugilanon of Epefania’s Hearbreak” is a fantastical reworking of a story she once told me about her older sister Fannie, otherwise known as Epefania, from their childhood in Bayawan. In a way, although it is about my aunt, this story was still inspired by my mother. That story, which also brings to life their mother Bebang and their grandmother Intan, has since been adapted into a Virgin Labfest play, written by May Cardoso. When it was staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2017, it gave me goosebumps to see my grandmother and my great grandmother—both of whom I’ve never met—somehow resurrected.

There is none of my mother at all in my third collection, Don’t Tell Anyone, since it is a collection of my erotica—a book peopled by my minor muses consisting of past loves and past hurts. But my fourth collection, Bamboo Girls, published by Ateneo de Naga University Press in 2018, is truly inspired by her. She is in fact the “bamboo girl” in that collection’s first story and title, based on her recollection of her grandmother once telling her that she had no mother and that was born from the cracks of a bamboo, in the thicket behind their old house in Bayawan—a story she believed in very thoroughly. The book ends with “Mother’s High Heels,” which is of course about her, and her high heels, and her resolute faith in her Protestant God.

The collection I am working on now, Where You Are is Not Here, contains one story that really excavates my mother’s life very thoroughly. It is titled “Ceferina in Apartment 2C,” and if one notices, I did not shy away at all from using her actual name. In that piece, I regurgitated her experience of her brief immigration to Los Angeles, where she lived briefly with my brother Rey in 2010. That story won me my second first prize in the Palanca, in 2022. If you have noticed, every time I write about my mother, I win a literary prize. If that is not the definition of a muse, I don’t know what is.

Why do I write about my mother? I truly consider her life dramatic. I have elaborated as much on her childhood in Bayawan, the loss of her mother and the disappearance of her father, and then later on, especially in “Ceferina in Apartment 2C,” her wish to escape her hometown by selling tira-tira, which funded her passage to Cebu City in the 1950s, where she was promised by a distant relative a chance to study nursing. That never happened. That promise broken, she found a job as a hairdresser in a beauty parlor along Jakosalem, eventually finding that she was quite good at that vocation, which she took to for the rest of her life.

I have already written, in a Martial Law essay I wrote that became viral when it was published by Rappler in 2022, about her life as a sugar haciendera back in her hometown in the 1960s and early 1970s, and then how she lost everything in the late 1970s, and how she dealt with the poverty that engulfed her and six boys in the 1980s and 1990s.

Someday I will write more fully about the part of her life between being a penniless hairdresser in Cebu in the early 1950s and back home in Bayawan as a sugar planter in the late 1960s.

Someday I will write about how a studio photograph of her which captured her in a very beautiful, pang-artista pose, made many Cebu men beeline to ask her out.



Someday I will write about her falling in love with the handsome scion of a rich Cebu family, and how she became pregnant … and how she was rebuffed by the boy’s mother who thought her totally beneath her social class.



Someday I will write about how she fled that drama by exiling herself to what she thought was a far off place—a little town called Nasipit in Agusan del Norte, where she opened her own beauty shop in a house owned by someone who would turn out to be my father and her future husband.



Someday I will write about how he pursued her, how she pushed back but then also fell in love. [He was suave, and had his ways with women.] I have actually already written something about their rocky marriage in an unpublished story, which I fictionalized by setting it in Bukidnon—but the bare details of that plot, including my father’s disappearance and his involvement in a cult and his eventual reappearance in our lives, is taken from their somewhat tumultuous life together, which climaxed with my father’s passing in 1997.

Someday I will write about how she is now in her golden years—and how, a few years ago, she got reunited with that old boyfriend from Cebu, to which she has, alas, said “no” to the possibilities of a romantic reunion. “Tigulang na ko,” is what she tells me. [Truthfully I don’t mind: the guy in his prime was very handsome, and I do not wonder at all why my mother fell in love with him all those years ago and bore him a son, my eldest brother.]

Some would say I am revealing too much of family secrets in my “fiction.” Truth to tell, my mother doesn’t mind. [The rest of my family as well.] She is a diva that way, enamored by the fact that she has somehow been transformed into literature. Who doesn’t want to be memorialized that way? Especially when it is accomplished via the lens of somebody who loves them.

I think this will always be my “forever gift” to my mother—returning to the intricacies and dramas of her life and using them over and over again as fodder for my fiction.

Someday I will turn my mother into a novel.

Labels: birthday, dumaguete, family, fiction, life, mother, philippine literature

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Sunday, August 03, 2025

9:00 AM | The Confessions of Second Hand Rose

“Age changes you. The first half of my life, I wanted to be interesting to many people. Now as I am on the second half, I only want to be interested and invested in the lives of those who are still around.”
~ Gabe Mercado


At the beginning of my birthday month, where I will be turning 50, I cannot help but think inwards and wonder about the ways my life thus far has unfolded. From the vantage point of being half a century old, I see strengths. I see frailties—so much frailties. I see patterns. Definitely patterns. In the sum of it all, what I’ve had has indeed been a singular experience of me being me, warts and all, and barring regrets, which is a useless exercise. But that is everyone’s story, isn’t it? All our lives are singular experiences to ourselves, and we can only hope to derive at least the satisfaction of having lived through all that. Does that make sense?

By the time you’ve reached middle age, you see patterns in the ways you cycle through your days. Do you see patterns in your life thus far? I do. One pattern I see overwhelmingly is how I am the embodiment of the song “Second Hand Rose,” a 1921 tune written by Grant Clarke and James F. Hanley for Fanny Brice, and popularized by Barbra Streisand in the late 1960s. It’s a funny song where the persona complains about never getting things when they’re new, but always getting them second-hand—“Even clothes I’m wearing / Someone wore before!” she complains in the song.

This is the anthem of my life! Because, truth to tell, I mostly never get things firsthand; always second-hand—and to me, I’ve learned to be perfectly fine with that reality. I am, I daresay, a creature of the second place, the second wind, the second chance.

Most of us have some sort of landmarks to measure success in life. I have never subscribed to the common dream of pursuing a cycle of college graduation / corporate job / car / condominium / conjugal bliss / children / croaking. We all have different measuring sticks, but one such that I somehow subscribed to was academic excellence. But I remember that all throughout grade school, I never was a consistent honor student. My record was quite checkered: there was a fourth place finish in the honor roll in Grade 1, nothing at all in Grade 2, a third place finish in Grade 3, none in Grade 4, a second place finish in Grade 5—and then to my utter astonishment, I graduated valedictorian. How did that happen? That was my first experience as a Second Hand Rose.

That academic adventure continued. In high school, there were many classmates who were more brilliant than I was, and so I chose to pursue something I was at least good at—which was writing, and thus I became editor-in-chief for the school paper. I chose an idea of “excellence” in my own terms, I guess. The brilliant classmates I had—all of them women—were ultimately graduated with very high places in the honor roll, but somehow I also found myself the lone male in their company, but one who was quite satisfied with a fourth honorable mention.

In college, determined this time to excel, I became part of the pioneering batch of Physical Therapy students at Silliman University, but a searing soul-searching episode during my first hospital duty in junior year made me realize I was not cut out for the field. I had just battled a losing skirmish with getting ordinary vital signs from the first patient assigned to me, and once outside that patient’s hospital room, I stared down the corridor which was bathed in soul-sucking fluorescent lights—and I realized all this was not for me. So I shifted to Mass Communication, much to the dismay of my family who had already bought the dream of me as a future OFW in some hospital abroad. I was soon in my second course! And I was not in a hurry to graduate either, relishing my second life as a college student now freed from the specter of what seemed to be the wrong career path. Second choices, second lives for Second Hand Rose.

After enduring three years of a halfhearted pursuit for physical therapy training, I wanted to taste what it was like to study abroad, believing that the best time to travel is when you’re a college student. I subsequently applied for a competitive exchange scholarship in Japan. I didn’t get that—the psychological exam I was made to take pronounced me somehow unfit for the endeavor [shades of future mental health issues!], and the slot was given to someone else. I stewed heavily and felt like a loser. But by the next year, the scholarship office decided to award me the opportunity anyway—and I did spend a year as a student in Japan, my first time to live out of the country, and throughout that exhilarating year—I was 21—I gloried in my new experiences, but also cried every night because of terrible homesickness. [I must have cried all my homesickness away that year, because I never became homesick again in future travels.] Nevertheless, in my estimation, Second Hand Rose won.

I finished Mass Com but didn’t even become a journalist. Upon graduation, there was an offer of job with the Manila Bulletin, but I didn’t see myself as a newshound, going around the big city chasing leads. So I nixed that, and went to graduate school instead, belatedly embracing the possibilities of a creative writing career. And just like that, without design, I became a teacher—just as the world began changing in the shattering realities after 9/11.

I taught without a break for a decade after that, and really went earnestly into writing, winning two Palanca Awards in a row—both of them second prizes for the short story. [It would take a few more tries before I got a first prize finish.] I wrote and I taught without taking a break for many years, and finally I got terribly burned out in 2009, which was around the time I also broke with a long-term relationship. I remember almost quitting teaching. I partied hard in the late 2000s, enjoying a second bout of carousing gusto in my early thirties. A second adolescence for Second Hand Rose!

Eventually, tired of partying, I began looking to redefine my life again. Armed with my old idea of taking a break, I applied for an arts fellowship in the U.S., this one with the promise of a week’s stay in New York. I wanted to cure my burnout and heartbreak with skyscrapers and big city life—the anti-thesis of Dumaguete. I actually made it to the final rounds of consideration!—but ultimately, they chose someone else. I stewed again and felt like a loser. But the local administrator of that program [basically, the U.S. Embassy in Manila] soon reached out to me, and felt that I was suited for something else: a fellowship at the International Writing Program in Iowa. And this one lasted three months, plus trips to Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., aaaaand New York. Of course I said yes. Again, it was an instance of not getting what I applied for, but getting something better in return. It happens. Second Hand Rose won again.

[A digression: While I was studying in Japan, I applied for a tourist visa to visit my brother in Los Angeles. I got denied. I tried a second time a few years later, back in the Philippines. I once again got denied—and then exiting the consular offices, I remember being furious and I remembering cursing the American dream before I left the compound along Roxas Boulevard: “I will never ever apply for an American visa again! Someday, it will be you—U.S. Embassy—who will invite me!” Ten years later, it was in fact the U.S. Embassy who facilitated my first American sojourn in 2010. Hurrah for Second Hand Rose!]

After that fateful American fellowship, I returned home, published my first two books, and then became the founding coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center—and to that I poured all my sweat and effort, and all my dreams. Plus I taught an insane overload of classes year after year after year. I was invariably told to entertain the idea of pursuing a Ph.D. abroad, but at the same I was retained as the only CW teacher in the department, and the only one teaching all the CW courses [except for poetry]—which proved confusing. Was I supposed to stay and teach, or go and pursue a higher degree? I somehow was made to feel that taking a sabbatical was not in the cards. By the time the pandemic came, I was ready for a burnout and a meltdown. I broke mentally. [Or at least the Zoom classes, and a bad bout of COVID-19, broke me.] I quit teaching, and I thought that was for good. I didn’t want to teach ever again. I became a social media manager instead.

Of course I spoke too soon. Because I’m back to teaching again, armed with lessons on how to navigate these things without me collapsing, or breaking. Is this, at 50, my second, third, or fourth wind? A friend I follow on X keeps posting the same message every day without fail: “Another day, another chance.” I heart his daily mantra every chance I get, because I believe in that wholeheartedly.

I think what I’m trying to get at in this long navel-gazing essay—cut me some slack, August is my birthday month and this is my birthday essay—is that [1] getting things secondhand is not a definition of who you are, and it’s just the way life is and how random it can be, and it is not fate; [2] getting second places is a good place to be, and first will eventually happen; [3] getting second wind means you are willing to rise above failures and try again; and [4] getting second loves [or third] and finally finding one that completes you means that, yes, you’ve kissed many frogs along the way but there will always be a Renz. Second chances are a gift.

I also believe that whenever I falter in the assorted challenges of my life, the one thing that makes me get up is the idea of persistence. Persistence is the secret formula: you do what you do best constantly and without fail, even with the occasional hindrances, even with occasional failures—you’ll get somewhere eventually. At fifty, I’d like to believe that everything I have accomplished and everything I have been awarded for is really because I have managed to persist. Even when I don’t believe in myself sometimes, even when I demonstrate spectacular failures, even when I disappoint myself and other people because of frailties that are undeniable parts of my shadow self, even when I feel discarded by forces beyond my control, even when I am at the brink of some sort of annihilation [sometimes of my own making] … I’ve somehow persisted.

That, and because I am always accommodating with every second chance [or third] that I’ve gotten.

Hello, August!

Labels: birthday, life

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Sunday, November 03, 2024

9:00 PM | Dessa at 60

Tonight, we celebrated Dessa Quesada-Palm's 60th birthday, in a lovely dinner and program with her friends of a lifetime at Essencia — and it was, to be honest, one of the most meaningful birthday celebrations I have ever come to witness. By the end of it, I was teary-eyed [and I never usually get teary-eyed at birthdays]. In occasions such as this, it's usual to have birthday greetings and speeches dedicated to the celebrator, but in the hands of a consummate theater artist like Dessa, each speech came at suitable intervals in a perfectly directed biographical narrative [with a good Powerpoint show to guide everyone]. And each speech was given by a perfectly handpicked friend or family representing an aspect or a major episode in Dessa's fruitful life — from her days as a member of the Quesada household [speech by sister Mae Quesada-Medina], from her life with PETA [speech by film director Avic Ilagan], from her days studying in New York [speech by composer Lerrick Santos], from early days in Dumaguete doing theatre workshops with the Divinity School [speech by Jean Cuanan-Nalam], from her almost two decades of mentoring YATTA [speech by Mellard Chiong Manogura], and from her love life [speech by her husband Colby Palm], interspersed with a monologue from Dessa's play Rape Buzz performed by Mayumi Maghuyop, improv comedy from the YATTA OGs Hope Tinambacan, Junsly Kitay, and Nikki Cimafranca, and music with the Quiz Family Singers, and the trio of Sharon Dadang-Rafols, Jean Nalam, and Dessa herself. At the end, she considered everyone in attendance and how each one has come to mean something significant in her life [it is at this point that I would finally break down and cry], and ended the evening with a song that she uses as her answer to the question: “What makes a meaningful life?”

Mother, you make 60 look fabulous. You have touched so many lives, and thank you for making Dumaguete your home, and the base of your theatrical gifts.

Labels: birthday, friends, people, theatre

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Wednesday, September 11, 2024

12:00 PM | Renz at 30

You are such a positive force in my life, I honestly can’t say how I would have survived the pandemic without you by my side. You are all of the good in the world in human form, and you bring so much light to so many people’s lives. You deserve all the happiness this world can give you, and I wish you the bestest 30th birthday today.

[Photo courtesy of Shi Mei Estimada]

Labels: birthday, life, love

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Saturday, August 19, 2023

7:47 PM | Birthday Returns

After the ravages of the pandemic, I’ve now found myself back to teaching. It was a very long hiatus from that part of my life which had always defined me. When I took the leave without pay, it was essentially to take care of my spiraling mental health, but it was also to find my footing in a world that suddenly felt alien. And now that I have come to the end of that long tunnel, here are some thoughts and some confessions.

There was a huge part of me that felt the leave was going to be permanent. When 2020 came around and we were on the precipice of the coming pandemic, about to jump into the abyss, I was already feeling burned out—although I must admit I was trying my best to ignore the symptoms.

In 2010, I had come back from the United States after a fruitful fellowship at the International Writing Program with so much vigor and many ideas, and then in 2012, I finally earned the MA I had been postponing for about a decade, and then I was appointed founding coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Center, with the creative writing program now fully back on as an academic offering—after decades of it being a neglected part of departmental concerns. Everything was full of promise. The work was fulfilling.

It was a joy to teach creative writing. Even the fact that I was the only creative writing teacher on the roster—although with an esteemed and retired faculty filling in as adjunct professor for poetry—did not bother me at first. [I was told there was a freeze in hiring given the uncertainties of K12.] I did not mind for the most part, because I genuinely loved teaching. I loved having the opportunity to mold writers at the beginning of their creative prowess. I loved that the efforts of those years produced so many books by my students, with two of them winning the Palanca for plays workshopped in my classes. [For my teaching purposes, I considered the Palanca and similar platforms, like the Virgin Labfest, my equivalent of a board exam—which is just the kind of professional marker denied graduates of creative fields.]

But the toll of all that eventually got to me. Workshops are not easy classes to teach; they require blood and sweat from both student and teacher, and immense amounts of concentrated time—and part of that difficulty was my fault: I was a demanding teacher, meticulous to a fault, and I also allowed the work to swallow me, sometimes giving up my own free time just to be able to workshop all the stories and plays submitted for consideration, with all the attendant revisions that come with them. I was also ignoring the fact that in that immersion, I was letting go of my own practice of writing—and then, like a cancer metastasizing, I secretly began to begrudge all the time taken away from my own pursuit of crafting fiction. I would find myself feeling defeated when a work that had been previously workshopped did not bear any effort at revision, and I’d think: “We spent all those hours talking about this work so that it can be improved—and yet nothing? What a waste of time!” Still, I worked myself to the bones. I did not take any sabbatical in a decade, nor did it occur to me I should. I was constantly told to pursue my Ph.D., but every year I was also given heavier loads to teach—and with the creative writing program still in the process of being fully formed, I felt the need to stay. During one schoolyear, enrollees to the creative writing program actually topped all the other programs being offered by the department—and I felt a sense of pride in that. But unbeknownst to me I was also slowly cracking.

The pandemic, with all its Zoom classes, broke me. In 2020, I thought making lecture videos for all the classes given to me would be the best way to go. As usual, I went about it with unsustainable effort that sprang from my undiagnosed ADHD: I was crafting meticulous scripts for every lecture, designing meticulous graphics to go with them, and waking up at 2 AM every day to record my spiel without the distraction of outside traffic to mess with my sound design. I wanted my videos to be topnotch, information-wise and design-wise. And I was making at least three lecture videos a day. It was a heavy burden that I was somehow able to “sustain”—until I contracted COVID-19 and was so sick, I could barely continue.

When I recovered from COVID two weeks later, I found I could not regain my footing—my anxiety was a deep maw I could not overcome; my brain was forever distracted like glass shards in perpetual limbo; my physical capability was limited and I could not move properly; my hair was falling out in clumps, I thought I was going bald; and my every day was defined by waking nightmares I could not begin to comprehend. Which was when my boyfriend finally forced me to seek psychiatric help.

I was diagnosed with adult ADHD—and it made perfect sense. It gave me an idea why over the years I was often forgetful, why I was often feeling overwhelmed and panicky, why I needed specific boosters to carry me through even tasks I could usually finish in an hour, why I hated answering text messages and emails, why it took so much to muster motivation for things that were quite easy for me to accomplish—but also why I also had a thousand brilliant ideas, and why, when the condition is properly managed, people with ADHD also say their mental singularity is a superpower. It was all that, and then multiplied to a greater degree because of the pandemic. [My therapist told me she was beset with so many mental health cases when the pandemic happened. “It is unprecedented,” she said. It was often difficult to set up therapy appointments with her, given the high demand on her time.]

For a while the psychotropic drugs I was prescribed to take helped. I cannot even begin to describe the perfect feeling of being on Ritalin. The way it massaged my brain. The way it made me feel secure. The way it made everything so clear. This is the thing: every single day for a person with ADHD is like having a brain that’s constantly full of static—but most of us learn to live with that kind of chaotic brain chemistry it feels almost normal. Ritalin, on the other hand, was all about calm, steadiness, and focus. Taking it was like being a person with bad eyesight finally putting on a pair of prescription glasses and seeing the world perfectly for the first time: you notice the outline of the green leaves of the trees, you notice the subtleties in the shadows, you can read signs from far away. The sky is bluer, the sea greener. Ritalin gave my brain breathing space, and its gift was concentration. I could remember things now; I could follow through tasks; I was no longer nervous about messaging anyone. [In fact, my first act on Ritalin was to respond to and purge all the unanswered emails on my inbox.]

And so the drugs helped, until they didn’t—because, truth to tell, I was feeling their efficacy waning out with every passing month, even as I slowly became physically dependent on the drugs. There were times, when my prescription was running low at the end of each month where I’d panic because I was running out of medicine to take—because the withdrawal was often severe. And the medicine was also very expensive.

Eventually, because of this and other circumstances, I made the decision to manage my condition without medicine. It felt unsustainable. When I made that decision, it was the month I was due to receive an award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, which was recognizing me for my work as a writer and as a cultural worker. I remember giving a speech in a televised ceremony at the Luce Auditorium—but feeling like my brain was flying elsewhere, especially in the panicky clouds that was secretly smothering me. But there I was on stage, acting as if I was perfectly fine; inside me though there was a dervish threatening to spin out of control.

Around this time, I made peace with myself about no longer teaching, because going back gripped me with so much despair. There were also circumstances that made my heart harden, like my department hiring the worst possible person in the world to be my replacement—and also finding out that in my gravest hours when I could not function, they could actually hire more people to teach and share the creative writing load. It was a dark time, and I admit my mental condition made many of my actions irresponsible—but never once did I feel my former colleagues reach out to me. [Some did, privately—but not the ones who mattered.] I had no plans of going back. A dear friend, Karl Villarmea, advised me however not to entertain thoughts of retirement or resignation: “Take a leave of absence instead, and then find out later if this is something you truly want to do.” I was at that time completely incapable of making definite decisions, and I am grateful that he went beyond himself to facilitate things for me as a representative of my teacher’s union. [In moments like this, you find out who your truest friends are.]

That was also the time I decided to focus on finding myself, and on pursuing writing without baggage. That was also the time I made the choice to step away from things that felt superfluous. I remember Renz reminding me: “You have done so much already, Ian. You don’t have to prove yourself anymore. You can just be yourself.” So I exiled myself to the proverbial desert for three years, turned my back on almost everything I used to hold dear, and leaned only on my creative endeavors for sustenance. It wasn’t utopia. Like I said, there were often psychotropic meds involved. And there were a lot of failures and disappointments, as well as unexpected successes.

I learned discernment.

I now know how to map the ebbs and flows of my mental challenges, and to recognize the whole thing as being not a flaw of character but as a health condition that can be managed. [Still working on this.]

I now know how recognize the honest promptings of my heart, and to obey it. [In other words, to trust your instincts. Because they’re often right.]

I know now how to calibrate expectations. [To under-promise, but over-deliver. Still working on this.]

I now know to disregard the entrenched worship of the institutional.

I also now know who friends truly are.

I have learned that I’m at my happiest when I write and create. [The exile was an extraordinarily productive time, creative-wise.]

I have also learned gratefulness, forgiveness, and the delicate balance of the adventurous yes and the self-preserving no. [Always saying yes burns you out; always saying no makes you lazy and uncreative.]

I do still need to work on replying to people in a timely manner [I get overwhelmed so easily by the volume I get, compounded by debilitating ADHD], but I’ve set up a structure that will help manage the flow.

Above all, I hope I don’t have to go back to the desert again. It wasn’t bad, but life I’ve found is more than just a metaphorical abundance of sand.

In the first faculty meeting I attended after being away for three years, my fellow teacher Rina Hill led a short reflection before we tackled the formal business of getting ready for a new schoolyear. She gave us a piece of paper with a question on it, which she asked us to ponder on. The question read: “What motivates me to work and work ‘with all [my] might’?”

It felt like the perfect question for my first day back as a teacher. What motivates me indeed? I found out that I’ve never lost my passion to teach—all the lectures and seminars and cultural tours I’ve given while in the “desert” prove that—but I just needed rest, and a new way of looking at things. My resolution now is to teach the best that I can without losing sight of myself, and my time, and my health.

Around June this year, while I was counting down the days before my official leave of absence was set to expire and I needed to decide once and for all what I wanted to do by the time August came, two friends approached me, each on their own, which motivated me to teach again.

The theatre artist Dessa Quesada-Palm, who teaches theatre directing, came to me and said: “Ian, my students need you as their playwriting teacher”—and explained why I needed to come back. Alana Narciso, a fellow literature teacher who was sitting in as chair of the department, also made an effort to meet with me, and told me over coffee: “Ian, you have so much to give our students as a creative writing teacher. Please come back.” She explained why I needed to come back. I thought of their implorations, and my heart began to melt. Sometimes the reassurances of friends are enough to make you reconsider things.

So here I am, back again. Scarred, but think wiser. The desert taught me well.

I celebrated my 48th birthday soon after the current schoolyear started. Birthdays are usually fraught with the blues for me. My dark days usually start right around the end of July and only lets up at the end of August, a monthlong commiseration about disappointments and growing older.

This year, I decided to let go, to let others in, to swim with the flow, and to reconsider once again my life’s work—and for all that, this turned out to be the happiest birthday I’ve celebrated since forever. Understated, but so full of meaning. May we all have this kind of birthday revelations.

Labels: birthday, life, mental health, teaching

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Wednesday, August 17, 2022

10:30 PM | Mother at 90

My mother turned 90 today. We share the same birthday. This is a biographical shorthand of her life so far, a few things one might want to know about her…

Mother was a child of the bamboo. She was a very young child when she lost her mother, Bebang, to childbirth [but which was spun off later on as being “gi-engkanto” by some spirit residing in a mango tree]. She had to live with her older sister Epefania with an assortment of aunts and her maternal grandparents in Bayawan, which was then called New Tolong. Mother’s father, a langyaw from Bohol, apparently disappeared after his wife’s death and had not been heard from since. In later years, when Mother would ask what happened to her parents, her aunts would tell her: “Gikan ka sa liki sa kawayan.” She would believe this story for many years. I have written an essay about this.

Mother is really Ceferina, not Fennie. Her birth name was Ceferina Malazarte Rosales, although for the longest time she thought Malazarte was her family name. Her sister was named Epefania. When they were younger women, however, my aunt made them change their names so that they would have “a better future,” because apparently, nothing of significance happened to young women named "Ceferina" or "Epefania." So my aunt renamed themselves "Fennie" and "Fannie." I’m not sure they did this legally though, and their usage of both names old and new has been erratic over the years. When you go over our birth certificates, some of us have a mother named Ceferina, and some of us have a mother named Fennie. Essentially, my brothers and I were born, according to official records, to two different women. I have written a story about this.

Mother escaped Bayawan by making tira-tira. This was after high school, and she was jealous of her more affluent friends who went to study college in Dumaguete and elsewhere. She wanted to leave the stifling life of small town Bayawan, and study in Cebu. But her aunts told her that only the worst things could happen to young women living alone in the big city. So she secretly made tira-tira to sell and earn money, and when she had enough saved, she bought a one-way ticket to Cebu to study to become a nurse, because a distant relative promised to fund her college education. When that promise was broken, she found herself making a living becoming a beautician in Cebu City. I have written an essay about this.

Mother fled Cebu to escape heartbreak, and found her way to Mindanao, in Nasipit, near Butuan, where she met my father, who was her landlord. She rented the space for her beauty parlor from him. He was a dusky bachelor with a penchant for dreams and beautiful women—and soon enough, she found herself married to him. They would stay in Agusan del Norte for many years. I have written an essay about this.

Mother returned to Bayawan in the late 1960s to help my father’s dream to become a sugar planter. They enjoyed a decade of success as hacienderos—but soon lost everything because of the sugar shenanigans of the Martial Law. We became very, very poor. I have written an essay about this, which became viral only a few months ago when it was published on Rappler.

When my father left for Davao to seek another fortune that never came, Mother virtually became a single mother. After selling what she could, she moved the family to Dumaguete in 1980, and for the next decade we moved nine times to seek cheap rent. She sold peanut butter and baye-baye to feed us, while at the same time plied her trade as a beautician without a parlor. She had one goal in mind: to put all her six sons through college at Silliman University—even though it was an expensive dream she could not really meet given her financial circumstances. She persevered. I have written stories about this period in our lives.

What point am I trying to make? That a lot of what I have written—my stories and my essays—have been inspired by my mother’s life. In a sense, she has always been my muse. When I write about her, I think I also write invariably about my own life and where I come from—and from her I take inspiration. My mother’s life has always been a source of encouragement. She defied all odds when she was younger to build a life for herself beyond the constraints of a small town existence. When she met challenges, she overcame them with determination and hard work, even when it took all of her. When the going became even tougher, she relied on her faith, but also on her will to survive. She was all guts and gusto. And through all that, she remained a beautiful person.

Ninety is a milestone, and a gift. Here’s to wishing my mother the best of all times, and the best of all worlds.

Labels: birthday, family, life, memories, mother

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Tuesday, August 16, 2022

6:26 PM | Six Hours Before I Turn 47.

Labels: birthday, life

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Friday, August 12, 2022

9:40 PM | When I Was Seven

[This is Part 1 of my birthday essay, a memory piece to celebrate my upcoming 47th birthday. I’m trying to remember who I was and what made me by trying to recall four specific ages—7, 17, 27, and 37.]



When I was seven, I did not know the vagaries of time. [No child does.] The past did not exist when we were seven, or at least we were not aware of its growing but inchoate shadows; the future did not matter. There was only now, the waking moment, both in the short morning hours and the long afternoon march to evening—punctuated midway by the martial calls by Mother to take naps, to get out of her hair while she went about doing chores.

We resisted the naps, of course, and stewed with vehemence when we could not get out of the daily obligation. We’d ultimately succumb to sleep but in the defiant prologue before slumber, we anguished to spend those siesta hours furiously looking for play instead. Or looking for isolated space to spend solitary joys, away from the admonishing rejoinders of older, other people.

It was probably more the latter, when I was seven. Although I had yet to discover books at that age, I could already recognize the pleasures of the solo idyll, adventures without playmates: on my own, I imagined battlefields and lurking monsters in the vast backyard of the house we rented in front of Silliman Village; I imagined the wooden walls of our house hiding nooks and crannies that hid entire villages of tiny people; I imagined entire worlds sprung from my hand with my arsenal of paper and pen.

“Ian draws very well,” a friend of my Mother remarked. “He should be an engineer.”

I did not know what an engineer was.

When I was seven, I learned to read, so to speak, from a sticker posted on our front door, which contained the following phrase: “Jesus is Love.” I learned on my own that each letter was a sound, and that when I put all the sounds together, they formed a word I could understand. My portal to words was gnomic theology.

When I was seven, my world smelled of peanut butter and baye-baye and the acrid smell of chemical treatments to curl hair—the things with which Mother made a living.

When I was seven, I refused to go to school. Mother had enrolled me in first grade at North City Elementary School—although everyone called it “Piapi,” like the barangay it existed in—and I had gone along with what was expected of me those first few months of the school year of 1982-1983. I had a teacher named Mrs. Limpiado, and I liked her. She is fixed in my memory as a gentle, kind, and patient soul with white hair and spectacles. One morning, I arrived at school to find out that she had gone “on leave,” apparently to visit family in America—and we were going to be under a new teacher.

I did not like the new teacher at all.

She was not as nice as Mrs. Limpiado, not to my estimation.

She made me feel nervous—and one day, my nervousness probably got the better of me and I peed in my pants during class. Somebody noticed the uncharacteristic puddle on the wooden floor, and the telltale wetness on my khaki shorts. The new teacher was flustered, and my classmates laughed. I don’t remember the humiliation, but I remember thoroughly the resolve: 

Labels: birthday, life, memories

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Friday, September 11, 2020

3:01 AM | For Renz on His 26th Birthday

I am constantly amazed how every day with you feels like a gift. Happy birthday, my love. You bring unicorn brightness to your notorious birth date.

Labels: birthday, love

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Monday, August 17, 2020

2:12 PM | My Mother Turns 88

Happy birthday, mom! It's also my mother's birthday today. She turns a gracious 88, and has plans to reach a hundred.

Labels: birthday, family

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Sunday, August 16, 2020

9:34 PM | Love Will Puts Us Together

I’ve learned to have the least of expectations about birthdays some years ago when I turned 38. I don’t really celebrate it anymore, allowing it just to take its course, come what may. The s.o. took me out on a pre-birthday dinner tonight in a new restaurant owned by a former student that just opened last Friday. The dinner was delicious. Then he took me to Chiccos for our favorite dessert of Bailey’s Bouquet, our first since the lockdown. It’s all so heartwarming, because surprise. We’re just winging it with life, to be honest, but it’s love that puts us together.

Labels: birthday, life, love

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Friday, June 19, 2020

7:16 AM | Happy 159th Birthday, Dude

Labels: birthday, heroes, history, people

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Sunday, August 18, 2019

1:38 PM | Here's to 44

The stars aligned, the heavens responded. I was hoping for the simplest of satisfaction: to be truly happy during my birthday this year. I still remember the terrors of last year, when I could not bring myself to celebrate because I was dealing with a terrifying problem I needed to face -- although outwardly, I had to put on a happy face, and even threw a dinner for visiting friends. This year, I harboured only wishes. But the midnight salubong was intimate and real, the s.o. taking me out for a walk along the Rizal Boulevard under the light of a full moon, which reminded me of the often overlooked [among the locals at least] beauty of my city. Then he told me while we crossed the street: "Remember, people love you. I love you. Your family loves you, your friends love you." And how he said that, so matter-of-factly, touched something deep in me and peeled away all sorts of bottled up fear and recriminations and self-loathing. To be loved, that is a gift. Then we treated ourselves to a huge ice cream parfait. By Saturday morning, I woke up earlier than usual, early enough for me to receive a text from my brother Dennis. He was inviting me for a family lunch, to celebrate the joint birthdays of my mother and me [yes, we share the same birthday]. It turned out to be a huge family affair at Negrense Food Lab: beside my immediate family, a good number of my cousins, my nephews, my nieces, my grandchildren (!!!) were all there: people I have not seen in months, and so there was delight in beholding familiar faces. And it felt just right, starting the day off with kin, the people of my blood. Our lunch was long, our talk carefree and easy-going, it felt like a gift. Then for the rest of the day, I wanted to do something creative. I had already finished putting in the final touches on two new short stories and had sent them out for publication that morning, and so for my birthday afternoon, I felt like doing something more of that sort: I wrote a historical essay about the Sands & Coral, finishing it over late afternoon coffee at Poppy's when the s.o. finally arrived to take me to our birthday celebration: a dinner for two at Adamo, like we always do. It was a sumptuous meal, and Chef Edison dropped by our table for a spirited conversation that must have lasted an hour. Then off to late-night drinks and midnight dinner with more friends, first at Allegre and then Chicco's. I was offline all day, and that made a great difference, I think. The gift I gave myself yesterday was spending time with people I love, and listening to the cravings of my creative side. Thank you to everyone who shared that day with me. Here's to 44.

Labels: birthday, life

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Saturday, August 17, 2019

1:45 AM | Salubong

“There are two great days in a person’s life: the day we are born and the day we discover why.” 

~ William Barclay

Labels: birthday, life

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Friday, August 17, 2018

9:00 AM | All the Cricket Songs in the World

I can only wish the poet Carlos Angeles is right—what relief it would have been to be on the nose about things, the world becoming a lens for desolation; it would have been so much easier to behold a landscape of bleeding sunrise in knifed horizon, peacock stain upon sand, the wreck of air, the murdered rocks refuse to die. Sadness sings in a Carlos Angeles poem, and I envy its odd redemption of cricket sounds.

Do you know this poem? You should read this poem.

But it has been a beautiful day, so I gather. I am told by the dearest someone beside me that it has been a beautiful day, and I cannot disagree with him. Outside, much later, the Thursday mid-August night settles into an ordinary sort of rhythm you will recognize for Dumaguete calmness, in the way this town of a city always does: the screeches of tricycle tires on asphalt gradually softening, a kind of simmering inside the darkening houses punctuated by the blue of television glow, the hurried talk of the young as they catch what remains of gentle city traffic on the way to some party somewhere, Escano perhaps.

It is the last stretch of Mercury in retrograde, in the middle of the ghost month, and the days I am told are beautiful.

I see this.

Everything in its full lightness—and how I envy the easy joys of the people I see, how I envy their capacity for life. The sun shines, the half moon plays hide and seek with the night clouds, and if I find myself by the Rizal Boulevard to see what becomes of the horizon, I will see how the bright blue-green of the surf plays magnificently with tropical light. I see this. I just do not feel any of it. The day is a ghost, and I am in the throes of the deepest sadness I know.

Sadness brings its own version of clarity—a small and shifting and acrid stillness in your brain that is the only stable thing in a tumbling sea of shadows, and the shadow of shadows. You grasp at this small thing, this precarious balance, this bedeviled clarity, and you make it your crutch. Thus to the world, you appear calm, you walk in measured steps, and there are occasions you even laugh. You pay bills, do the moribund things like cleaning the house, like going to work, like enjoying the rib-eye steak at this digs in a new food park somewhere in the bowels of Claytown. You somehow exist, and for now that is enough.

But there is no use confiding to people—not many will understand, will dismiss things as mood swings you should be able to handle, their advise is “to snap out of it,” a judgment you accept because it takes too much energy to argue otherwise. Besides, you know this is the only vocabulary they have in this language of psychology they do not speak. You know the world would not bother to read the dead depths in your eyes. If they looked closer, they would have seen a gaping void where no light lives, where nothing makes sense, where everything disperses into the wreck of air. You wish for the fantasy and simplicity of snapping out of it.

The last happy year, as far as I can consider the vagaries of days and memory, was 2012—the year the world was supposed to end if the ancient Mayans were to have their way. It did not end. The calendar from those ancient days pointed to the conclusion of a b’ak’tun (a time period in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar), which contemporary archaeologists had determined to be the 12th of December, 2012. That abrupt end simply did not account for a tomorrow, and how that made everyone go on a tizzy—do you remember?—but I was happy. I felt that my life by then had rounded all corners, had satisfied most of my dearest dreams. Life was full, and if it were to end in the name of the Maya, so be it. I remember my own anticipation of December 21 when it rolled into the calendar, to meet its dawn like it was probably the last, and to feel from the earth any signs of mysterious stirrings that were supposed to signal some catastrophe that would end everything. I waited till midnight. Except for reports of an earthquake somewhere else in the world, the world did not end.

Did the scientists read the calendar wrong? Or perhaps the Mayans were the first trolls, laughing from somewhere among the nine layers of their Place of Awe, their version of the hereafter, at our gullibility? Or did we just place too much of a superstitious emphasis on the meanings of relics we have scarcely come to understand? I doubt there are suitable answers to these questions, and I am not an archaeologist.

Some time ago, I read a tweet that posited another probability. Perhaps the world did end in 2012 in some otherworldly cataclysm our human brains simply cannot begin to comprehend, and we are now merely wraiths living in the shadows of that catastrophe we cannot see. Which is why the world is what it is, at the moment, a topsy-turvy purgatory. We are all dead—and the world right now is just the long sigh of the consciousness of our collective soul going into that cosmic bright light. Perhaps. I have never felt right since 2012, and a part of me is inclined to agree. As of this writing, in about three hours, I shall turn 43.

Somewhere where I cannot hear them crickets despair in ambushing me with their song.

Labels: birthday, life

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